Followers

Friday, January 19, 2018

Eric Kiraithe, must really be well paid. Being the official
spokesman of the Kenyan Government, is, in the words of Jerry Maguire, “an
up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege” that I’m sure he will never fully tell us
about. We got a glimpse of what the job entails when the government sent him
out this week to defend the indefensible: US President Donald Trump’s description
of Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as “shithole countries” and his declared
preference for immigrants from Northern Europe.

The mental
gymnastics Kiraithe had to engage in were a spectacle to behold. No doubt trying
to curry favor with the famously petty and vengeful Trump, he declared that Kenya
had no problems with African countries being called “shitholes” but nonetheless
supported the African Union in condemning the comments whose context, he
claimed, the government was still studying “to see whether it is worth the
attention”, even though it had already determined that they were not directed
at Kenya.

Still, there perhaps was an easier, and perhaps less humiliating,
way for Kiraithe and his minders to extricate themselves from the bind. Trump may
be an ignorant, racist, pathetic excuse for a human being but if we are honest,
his sentiments are not dissimilar to attitudes held by many of the
“respectable” people lining up to condemn him in the West and even here in
Africa.

As any African applying for visa will tell you, the
indignities visited upon us in the process make it plain that we are not
exactly welcome. It is humiliating to have to demonstrate to strangers that one
is not about to abandon one’s family and nation to live on the streets of
Europe or America, to have them stand in judgment over your acceptability as
human being. And that is just how the system treats those seeking a legal route
for a temporary visit.

The reaction to the so-called European migrant crisis which
saw more than a million unwanted migrants and refugees from the middle east and
Africa cross into Europe in 2015, shows the extremes that will be considered in
order to turn them back. “Europe has decided to cooperate with Libyan
authorities, knowing the kind of torture, abuses, detention that migrants and
refugees are exposed to in Libya,” Amnesty International’s Maria
Serrano told Voice of America last month.

Of course, the idea of a crisis is not extended to the
nearly 12.5 million Europeans who are resident in a country not their own
within the European Union, even when 95 percent of these are hosted in just six
countries. It is only a crisis when they come from “shithole countries”.

And it is not just Europeans. Israel’s Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Kenya in November declaring how he loves
Africans, seems
to only love them when they stay at home. Back in Israel, he has taken to
branding African asylum seekers “infiltrators” is deporting thousands of them.
In Libya, slave markets have re-opened with many of the same Africans Europe is
turning away being treated as commodities.

But African citizens do not even need to try to leave the
continent in order to experience the dehumanization associated with
immigration. Kenya’s abysmal
treatment of refugees from Somalia -who are crammed into crowded camps,
forbidden from seeking work, regularly demonized as terrorists and even illegally
forced back into the war zone across the border – is no less humiliating.
Neither are the hoops Kenyans themselves – as well as other Africans - are
forced to jump through when attempting to visit South Africa, formerly the
continent’s largest economy, are no less humiliating.

In fact, Africans don’t even need to try to go outside their
countries’ borders to be insulted or have heir humanity questioned. Hollywood as
well as Western aid agencies and media regularly does it right in the comfort
of our homes with their portrayal of Africa as a troubled, exotic paradise
peopled by childishly simple, naïve beings unable to deal with the challenges
of life and who need white saviors to rescue them from other white devils or
from themselves.

Rounding out the parade of insulters are African elites,
especially in the media and in politics, who have become our very own Uncle
Toms, loyally regurgitating and fleshing out the worst stereotypes that the
West has of us. Having opted not to reform the racist, extractive colonial
states they inherited in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these elites have
trouble seeing the humanity of the masses of citizens they prey on. So, like
the Europeans before them, rather than fix dehumanizing political and economic
systems, they try to beat and shame the natives into compliance with them, into
accepting the space that the world has allocated to them at the back of the bus
- which is the reason so many try to leave in the first place.

This brings us back to Trump and his comments. So should
Kenyans be offended by them? You bet they should. But no more so than by the
treatment and representations Africans have to endure every day from a world
that has decided that they come from “shithole countries” and so must be shitty
people.

And the supreme irony of it is, up till less than a century
ago, Africans were quite content to stay on the continent. It was shitty people
from other places who came here and forced them out. It was shitty people who took them to places
like Haiti, where, after they fought for and won their freedom, more shitty
people blockaded and invaded them and created the very conditions today that a
shitty American President, blissfully unaware of this, today disparages.

However, it is an irony that is completely lost on Kiraithe
and the folks he speaks for.

Friday, January 12, 2018

In his piece in the Daily Nation, Roy Gachuhi speaks of how
the failure to build strong institutions in Kenyan sport has left even the most
successful teams vulnerable to the financial shocks caused by the withdrawal of
a major sponsor. He is referencing the troubles caused by sports betting firm
SportPesa’s pulling all its sponsorship of local and national teams following
the failure of its legal challenge against the government’s move to raise taxes
on betting profits. It is a move that
may ground a large number of the country’s favorite sports brands.

“Fifty years down the line, AFC Leopards and Gor Mahia
should be evaluating the suitability of the many organizations lining up to associate
their brand with them,” Gachuhi says. He also reminds us that “Kenya’s sports
politics closely mirror our national politics”. One obvious similarity is the dependence on the
dirty money that is generated by selling false dreams to poor people.

According to Moses Kemibaro, a digital marketing
professional based in Nairobi, SportPesa, the largest of them all, rakes in over Sh300 million a month. A GeoPoll survey of youth between the ages
of 17-35 in sub-Saharan Africa found Kenya had the highest number of youth who
were frequently gambling and that they spent Sh5000 a month on the habit, the
highest on the continent. This in a country where, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, three-quarters of those in
formal employment earn under Sh50,000 a month.

So the sponsorships whose loss many are bemoaning are a
small fraction of the billions being taken from millions of poor people who are
fed the illusion that sports betting is, as SportPesa’s slogan goes, “Made of
Winners”. Only the betting companies make money when bets are lost, not when
they are won.

But what they make is a pittance, and the suffering they
cause is negligible, when compared to the outrageous fortunes and misery
generated by the, to borrow Hilary Clinton’s phrase, “basket of deplorables” to
whom we’ve mortgaged our national political life. They have taken to a whole new level the art
of throwing around a relatively tiny bit of cash in exchange for the chance to
make gazillions. Presidential election campaigns spend an estimated Sh5 billion which, including all the other races down the
order, could add up to Sh36 billion. This is undoubtedly a lot of money. But considering
that the country is estimated to lose Sh600 billion from corruption each year
and that a large chunk of that is pocketed by the politicians in power, you can
see how it works out to be a good deal.

Why must we feed the
baser natures within society in order to be allowed a few crumbs for its better
sides? Why is it necessary to procure resources for our sport from industries
that sacrifice millions of youthful futures? Or to offer up our sovereignty,
wealth and even lives to scoundrels in return for patronage posing as
“development”?

I think it is actually a good thing that SportPesa has
pulled the sponsorship. A deal with the Devil is not how we should seek to
support our sportspeople. And maybe once the band aid is removed, we can we
will be able to see and deal with the real, festering source of our public
woes. The money that companies like SportPesa pump into sport tends to paper
over the state’s under-investment in sport as well as its preying on athletes as
was graphically illustrated during the 2016 Olympics.

But there again, our deals with devils, this time within
government, stand in the way. Sadly, we won’t be exorcising the demons in
Parliament or in State House anytime soon. And even if we did, there are others
pretending to be angels of light waiting to take their place. Like with
SportPesa, we need to change the terms of the deal and radically raise the bar
for what is acceptable in terms of governance.

No more false promises. We must
demand tangible action, whether it is to improve the lot of the sports
fraternity of to reform the electoral system or to implement the report of the
Truth Justice and Reconciliation Report. To do this, we must be willing to risk
the political class withdrawing the few parochial benefits it offers just as
SportPesa has done. But if we are firm and refuse to succumb to the blackmail,
the rewards would be much greater than what we have become accustomed to
settling for.

Friday, January 05, 2018

Kenyans can be amazing in their self-contradictions. Take matters
death, for example. When our politicians pass on, they are immediately raptured,
in the popular imagination, into a heavenly pantheon and cleansed of all
earthly sin. Not so regular folk.

Following the spike in road crashes in December which have claimed
over 200 lives, many have not been shy about placing the blame on those who
have perished, either labeling drivers drunk, undisciplined or careless, or
branding passengers as silent lambs willingly going to the slaughter.

I have often wondered about this seeming compulsion to blame
ourselves for the misfortunes we endure, even when it is manifest that their fundamental
causes lie elsewhere. When the politicians in government steal from us, we
blame ourselves for electing them in the first place, as if the act of voting then
justifies stealing. When the same politicians use the police or militia for
violence to secure their positions on the bargaining table, we blame ourselves
for our tribalism and bloodthirst.

Similarly, when the state designs
and maintains a murderous road transport system, we blame ourselves for its
very predictable consequences. It is our failure to obey its dictates that is
to blame, we are told, even though we know that following the rules still gets you killed.

TV presenter and columnist, Larry Madowo, ably demonstrates
this confusion in his
latest offering on the dangers of using public transport for long-distance
travel at night. After acknowledging that he is one of a privileged minority
that does not need to do this he adds that “for millions of Kenyans for whom
that is not an option, they are unknowingly putting themselves in danger every
time they board a bus or a matatu and hope they get to their destination in one
piece.”

Sounds reasonable, no? Then a few lines later, he hits us
with this: “Taking any public transport in Kenya is to knowingly put yourself
in danger.” Huh?

He proceeds to reel off a list the usual suspects, from
tired, drunk and unqualified drivers trying to meet impossible targets to
matatu crews colluding with gangsters to rob passengers, to mechanically
defective vehicles and their owners - the very cops turning a blind eye. He
notes that there are no regularly enforced “minimum standards for crew
discipline, vehicle maintenance and roadworthiness” and few consequences for
anyone failing to play their part. It is as close a description of a shattered
system as you are likely to get.

Yet despite this, Larry still seems to believe that the
system is fundamentally sound. “All this carnage can be eliminated without
introducing a single new law but simply enforcing the existing ones and
shutting down all the avenues for bribery.” Once again, the problem, as he sees
it, is the failure to beat the native out of the Kenyan, to force him to comply
with a broken system.

This kind of thinking has very colonial roots. The British
proclaimed that they came on a civilizing mission and used extreme brutality to
try to beat the natives into shape. For example, in his book Kenya: A History
Since Independence, Charles Hornsby describes the European settler view of
roots of the Mau Mau war as “unrelated to economic or political oppression …
they lay in the Kikuyu’s inability to adapt to the demands of modernization”.

Lawyer Pheroze Norwojee says "tyranny is very
unoriginal". Those who inherited the colonial state after them, retained
the same view of the sanctity of even oppressive rules and of Africans as the
problem. As Jomo Kenyatta asked Kenyans in the lead up to independence, “if you
cannot obey the present [colonial] laws, how will you be able to obey our own
laws when we have them?” Thus, instead of reforming the oppressive regime, they
tried to force the people to comply with it. As quoted by Hornsby, the late Masinde Muliro described it thus in 1967: "Today we have a black man's Government, and the black man's Government administers exactly the same regulations, rigorously, as the colonial administration used to do."

It is this approach that has created the predictable
consequences and contradictions evident in our political system today, for our
humanity will not simply fade away quietly. Similarly, the attempt to force
road users to comply with a horrendous road system will continue to generate
seemingly chaotic and suicidal, but always very rational, behavior. In the end
blaming Kenyans, rather than the system, will always lead to oppressive
responses that try to fix Kenyans rather than policy fixes to the system.

Yet the fact is we need comprehensive change, both in the
institutional design of how we manage road transport as well as in the rules
those institutions are tasked with implementing and enforcing. That will require
new thinking, new systems, and yes, Larry, new laws.

New laws on who can own matatus, for example. New laws on
how we respond to road crashes, perhaps a requirement that they all be
investigated and lessons learnt. New laws to prevent the National Transport and
Safety Authority understating the extent of the carnage on our roads, which
they do by
nearly 80 percent. Most importantly, new laws on whom we hold accountable for
the failures on our roads. Simply blaming the dead and dying victims on our
roads will not do.